The Better Beast
by OnceUponAFanficx
Summary: A series of one-shots about the thoughts, feelings and sights Rumple must have but we're never allowed to see. Some fluff, some Rumbelle, some father/son memories, mostly a tribute to my favourite character ever.


**_OOC; Hello Dearies!_**  
**_I really want to know if you think I should carry on with this! I want to make a series of kind of shorts getting into the different scenes and feels Rumple has about various things but you don't get to see. This one is about a very young Bae, the first love of his life, but I'd like to make them about Belle and the other things he sees and does in between all this stuff. I love his character and think he deserves so much attention. _**  
**_Please Review, Rate, whatever you want to do so I can figure out if I should carry on with this! I appreciate all feedback. _**  
**_Thank you! Iris._**

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**_Prologue_**

_Not much of a man,  
But still I am a man,  
And you bring out something inside me.  
A perfect little diamond,  
A fragile little fire,  
You're everything good in the world,  
To me._

For him, the sensation was unlike any other. It was like gazing into the blackest sky and witnessing the implosion of the sun, every fiber and hair on his body stood upright and every muscle twitched with a complex, terrifying admiration. To him, tiny universes were formed and perished in the compassion of the young boy's smile, his hair was no less soft and delicate than the soothing breeze that freshens a laborer's back in summer and there was a goodness in the depths of his eyes which he was confident was no less powerful than beholding the face of God. He was the Saintly light at the end of a very long, very arduous tunnel, endlessly swimming with beauty.

It was the first time he had truly touched upon love. He could feel the stirring in his chest of violent paternal storms that swore to protect the tiny seraph he held in his hands or die trying. He had never believed anyone could feel and think and breathe in the essence of someone so deeply that their desire was to consume them, but he felt urged to wrap the tiny boy up within his arms and shield him from an unfair world, a world he was forced into but which his father tenderly realized would be a better place with the addition of this tiny, spirited little creature.

His mother was distracted, off doing something else. It was better like that, it meant he got his son all to himself. A selfish pride held Milah to him, not love. Never love. He had a duty to provide to his son a home, no matter how dilapidated and a family, irrespective of his own feelings. He had once dreamed of obtaining his wife's love again, but it was insignificant now. It merely added another brick to the pile with which he built the walls that had always kept the strain of other people and love away. And now, his son was crashing those walls down and invading into his life, stealing his love, leaching away his sadness and replacing it with pure joy and pride.

"Baelfire." Was all he could muster, he was so taken aback by powerful parental instinct that his throat had run dry of words. All around him the reality of his pitiful life, the life which he had made for his son, dawned and crashed down upon him; everything from the dampness in the air which made both he and his child cough during the night to the crackle and spit of wet logs in the fire.

"My boy, Baelfire." The youngster squirmed and giggled at the sound of his father's gentle voice. He patted the baby's head and smiled as the tiny babe struggled with his lips to find the right sounds with which to reply and instead puckered his mouth and blew what looked like kisses blindly into the air. "So tiny, so innocent and so perfect. You do put all the other babies to shame." His father feigned vanity and pressed a hand to his cheek in mock shock, and the tiny boy burst once again into giggles, his face wrinkling up and his mouth lolling wide open. "It sure is good luck you got your lovely beautiful features from your mother", he added, "and not your ugly pa." He drifted off quietly from speech and gently brought the baby up to rest on his shoulder, where tiny hands grabbed handfuls of matted black hair and nestled into the warmth of his neck.

He sat back gingerly into what little comfort his old, splintering wooden chair provided, a sharp pain running down his leg which now served as merely a useless dead weight, hanging limply against the floor of their shack. Idly, his rugged wooden cane had been discarded the moment he had been handed the baby and left to lean against the arm of the chair, and it jovially clattered to the ground as he caught it with his limp knee.

He stopped himself just before he cursed. There was no use now, the baby was clung to him and he had no way of standing up. He was trapped there until Milah came home to help him, or he learned to sprout wings. But he didn't mind. It'd be a shame to end his moment with his son anyway. And so, trapped lamely in a chair, a baby clinging to his hair and head and his cane too far to reach, Rumplestiltskin, the village coward, shamed husband and more of a loving father than anyone could possibly know, drifted into a peaceful sleep.


End file.
